I grew up on MECC on Apple IIs, our schools had their monthly--or was it quarterly?--software subscription.
Checking out the wikipedia page, seems like TLC bought them, and then TLC themselves got bought and gutted by some ruthless businessmen at a company called SoftKey. TIL it was none other than Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary that was part of that takeover. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftKey
SoftKey played a major role in the dissolution of the edutainment industry by the turn of the millennium.
ugh :(
The company pioneered revolving racks with software packaged in standard CD jewel cases, allowing them to display three times as much product.
Oh wow this brought back the memory of those things sitting on the floor at CompUSA. It didn't take long to associate those sorts of displays with absolute garbage shovelware.
I remember playing Oregon Trail on an Apple ][ in the "computer lab" during my brief public school incarceration. When my dad got an IBM clone back in the day, I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and OutNumbered! along with some other geography, history, and math games. My sisters played Reader Rabbit and Richard Scarry's Busytown a fair bit later on.
My first real game was probably the version of Descent bundled with a sound card.
MECC made I several versions of Oregon Trail, the last one for one of the later revisions of the II (or maybe it was an early Macintosh) had the best hunting minigame. You could mow down the entire animal kingdom with rapid fire. Of all of their games though, I ended up playing DinoPark Tycoon the most, but by then I was playing at home. It was a fantastic game and birthed a huge strategy genre. I had a pirated copy of Carmen Sandiego and could never quite figure out how to play or make it fun.
Descent was so good. I didn't play a ton of it but I ended up playing its N64 clone Forsaken for many hours. Mechwarrior 2 was the first real 3D game I got into. I can remember being amazed at its limited and low resolution texturing.